Jaap van den Born (1951) and Bart FM Droog (1966), two Dutch investigative journalists and poets, investigated in 2016 and 2017 poetry, allegedly written by Adolf Hitler and other tyrants. They did so after the publication of a book called Flowers of evil. Poetry by dictators by Dutch author Paul Damen. It received worldwide attention.¹

Van den Born and Droog however, found out that it consisted mainly of concoctions and fabrications, and was built on plagiarism. Their articles on this fraudulent book were praised by the Dutch newspapers Dagblad van het Noorden and NRC Handelsblad and the Belgian De Standaard.²

One year before Droog researched a case of plagiarism in the UK. The Guardian and The Independent reported on this investigation, which caused the winner of the Stephen Spender Prize 2015 to withdraw his poems and return the prize money.³

Whilst researching the so called 'Hitler poems' they learned a lot about the Hitler artefacts forgery and auctioning industry.

So when the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) claimed on November 25 2017 to possess a 'real' Hitler aquarel and Van den Born and Droog read the NIOD arguments, it set off all alarm bells.

In a couple of days they found out that there was absolutely no proof for this claim and that the NIOD-research into this aquarel was based almost entirely on works and words by Prof Dr. August Priesack (1908-ca. 1993), one of the persons who stood at the cradle of the forged Hitler diaries in 1983.

The late Dr Priesack was also co author of Adolf Hitler. The unknown artist (1984), a catalogue of hundreds of paintings and drawings 'by' the nazi dictator. A book consisting mainly of forgeries. A fact worldwide known since 2002, yet unknown by NIOD.